I have a 2710p the is having the Sleep of Death problem frequently. I can see the screen with an external monitor, but I am usually not at my desk. So far, HP apparently does not know about the issue because: Sent back for another issue (might be related) and had the memory replaced. Called again, they sent someone out to replace the MOBO. Now the web cam never works, and I again reported the sleep issue. It is going back again tomorrow.

And here’s me thinking it was something I had been doing. I thought I was imagining things. Now I know that I wasn’t. Come on MS, sort this out. Thankfully, I haven’t had the “Vista Insomnia” problem as I keep my laptop in it’s zero shock case a lot. I’d be gutted if something happened because of the lack of an MS update.

I have a Dell XPS m1330, with Vista Business (I did my own fresh install), and have had it for the past 3 months. I use the sleep functionality extensively, and have never had any issue at all with it. It’s actually worked better than the Powerbook G4.

I’ve had the following happen with my HP 2710p: Three times the system did not enter sleep mode. I close the lid, the drive runs like it’s going to sleep, then just does nothing. Every few seconds the drive LED will blink and I’ll hear it doing something. If I wait long enough the system reboots and there’s a bugcheck entry in the event log indicating a BSOD occurred.

I’ve also had one instance of trying to wake the machine from sleep mode only to have it hang. No drive activity, no display, just a power light. I let it sit for half an hour before cycling power.

I have the “random restart from sleep” issue on my HP nw8240 w/ XP SP2. Interestingly enough, this started happening after I updated the drivers for the ATI FireGL 5000 video card.

So this is not just a Vista issue.

My machine does this most of the time when I switch between AC and battery while in sleep or hibernate. My strategy is to configure the power button for sleep (maybe default? don’t know). Whenever the display is gone, I just press the power button shortly to put the machine into sleep mode again and after waking it up for the second time, the display is back on again.

Use your blogging superpowers to get someone to explain project velocity to you and how much effort was put into dragging hardware makers to update their f#cking drivers.

I think the only real way that Microsoft could enforce any rules on the driver manufacturers would be to insist on driver signing (as is the case with 64 bit Windows) and then test the code thoroughly themselves. This obviously opens a whole new can of worms and the 64-bit driver signing requirement is already contentious.

I don’t do any driver development but I’m familiar with the documentation that Microsoft provide for other programming scenarios. As a result, I would be very surprised if Microsoft hadn’t provided driver developers with everything they needed long before Vista went live last November. There has been lots of documentation explaining what programmers needed to do to ensure compatibility with Vista going back at least a couple of years now.

I don’t think I’ve had either of these problems with Vista on my X61t, but I’ve had a couple recurring problems with hibernate: 1) I’ll tell it to hibernate and it will turn off the screen, but the computer will never turn off. A couple times I’ve just left it that way overnight and come back in the morning to find that it had rebooted itself. 2) Often when I wake it from hibernate, I’ll swipe my finger to log in, then turn away for less than a minute to take care of something, and then turn back to find that it’s going back into hibernate. Both drive me bonkers.

I’ve seen this happen on my home laptop, a Toshiba something-or-other that came with Vista. It would go to sleep, and then wake up without the screen on.

I’ve also seen it at work, on a brand new Dell Latitude laptop. I had bungled the driver installation – dell makes it annoyingly hard to find out exactly what hardware is in your computer if you weren’t the one to buy it – and somehow installed drivers for something the computer didn’t actually have. As a result, sleep wouldn’t work at all. Windows XP used to nag about this: “A device in your computer is preventing it from going to sleep!”. Vista doesn’t appear to, not that I’ve seen.

What Microsoft can do to make drivers work better is to A) define the reference sufficiently for OEMs to meet the requirements for the new OS and B) not allow OEMs to install Vista on devices with drivers that are known to not meet the requirements.

That said, if Microsoft can release updates in SP1 to help with these problems then they can in fact do something and the sooner the better.

An interesting fact that I discovered one day with the Sleep of Death: I had my external display connected to my notebook when this happened. The external screen worked (to my amazement) and pulled up the display properties to see what the damn problem was. Well, the display properties reported that the notebooks own screen wasn’t — so to say — connected.

“What?”, I thought. So, I pulled up and moved the device manager to diagnose what had happened. Well, what did you know… the notebook’s own screen isn’t listed in the device manager. And, scanning for any plug and play devices rendered no new devices. So, I pulled up the command prompt (which I could do if blind folded by the SoD):
1) Windows Key + R
2) Enter “cmd” and press Enter
3) Enter “shutdown /r /t 0″ and press Enter
4) The result should be a less hard reboot… but still doesn’t solve the problem…

I have previously believed that this was due to the year old ATI drivers that I’m forced to run with Vista, since this happened mostly after removing the external monitor and my computer woke from sleep.

I’ve had the sleep death issue on my thinkpad R61. Initially I was hard rebooting pretty quickly. Once though I let it sit, and after about 10 minutes, it blue screened. I looked at the crash dump with the windows debugging tools, and it did seem that the nvidia driver was at fault. I don’t know what microsoft can do to make these drivers/hardware wake up better, but they definitely need to be working hard with the people who are making the drivers to get this issue resolved.